There are still many question marks around One UI 3.5 and what it will bring to the table. But Apple showed its hand this week and we all know Samsung cannot and will not be indifferent to what its biggest rival is doing. So will iOS 15 bring UX design lessons for Samsung to learn from?
It could be that Apple seems to be exploring some more niche features with its next major operating system update. Take, for example, the option to upload your driver’s license to Apple Wallet. If you take more than one TSA exam a year, you’ll probably get a few miles from that exam. Well, as long as you don’t mind the dystopian consequences when your government compares your smartphone data to its database of (un)desirable entities.
FaceTime: Samsung Galaxy Edition
The ability to initiate a FaceTime call with Galaxy devices will likely prove to be a popular addition to iOS 15. However, it remains to be seen whether Samsung will do anything to enable such cross-platform communication. It could be, but we can’t say that such a move seems very obvious at the moment.
When it comes to machine learning and other such capabilities, Samsung is still way ahead of its Cupertino competitor. For example, Bixby has been able to identify things like dog breeds and plants for years. However, this feature won’t come to some iPhones and iPads until this winter. It doesn’t matter that it was Google that originally started this trend.
The extra privacy that’s on the way to iCloud — now called iCloud+ — seems like a feature worth copying. Especially about how iOS users will soon be able to automatically generate “fake” email addresses when they sign up. Samsung has kind of neglected the cloud aspect of its mobile offering in recent years, so we’d appreciate anything beyond the status quo in this area. Something like this built-in two-factor authentication code generator would be nice too.
One more (UI) thing…
While some of Apple’s promises may seem tempting at this point, many of them will seem like a “too little, too late” case for most Galaxy owners. Take notifications, for example, or the weird case where my Twitter feed fills up with people celebrating the arrival of profile pictures for notifications from third-party messaging apps? Is that what iOS users are looking forward to these days? The prospect of seeing mom’s selfie once she finally responds to her WhatsApp message? If more people stopped asking parents for credit to buy iPhones and held luxury brands responsible for their overpriced accessories, we might not have #notifications on Twitter by 2021. And Mom would have answered sooner.